The Video Game Critic

You often see two terms a lot on game message boards, and I am afraid both are immature terms - 'fanboy' and 'troll' - A 'fanboy' is a person who seemingly likes something too much, a 'troll'  someone who supposedly posts only to tweak you and your precious, unimpeachable opinion on gaming, someone who does not accept the Metaopinion of the day, that you have absorbed and cling to like it is doctrine.

I will not touch on trolling, because it is never a problem if you take care of your own posts, and do not let someone else dictate your position to you.

But the fanboyism I think is a stumbling block to the unity and well being of gaming.

Fanboy is nearly ALWAYS applied to console brands - unless you play everything, you are a fanboy, which is silly. If you do not buy wholy into what the Metaopinion of what a consoels stenghts and weaknesses are - REGARDLESS OF YOUR OWN PEROSNAL TASTE - you are a fanboy.

And my point is - isn't that a wonderful advantage to game makers, to distract away from the faults of their products, and take away the formerly predictable expectation of quality assurance or price limits on games?

Why do the game console buying masses not have common values on expectations for game buying anymore? For example -

- Why did you not see a universal uprising against very expensive DLC, doubling the cost of games, and pay online services? Not to mention microtransactions creeping into expensive retail games?

-Why are CONSOLE game buyers so accepting of very messy games, long install times, and huge PC patches (often day one on, disc software!)  which have taken over a good portion of the console market, on some systems? Back in the hey-day of PS2 console gaming, PC gaming was thought to be dead or dormant, now it dominates consoles - is that the biggest irony of our day and time?

We are seeing more and more blow back from some of these issues on forums and social media - but is it just a small fringe? Will it have any affect on the future of console games and game buying? Or is console gaming essentially dead, has the internet changed it into something that cannot be truly called console gaming, at this point?

Are consoles definable as consoles today?  Why are people buying consoles that behave like PC's, except they are far more expensive to buy and play games on, and why do they not care about that?

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Poor old Steer...

There is a ton of entertainment value to be had on Nintendo's competitors. Few games are shipped broken, few have exorbitantly priced DLC, and there is an abundance of high quality software available. When something that's distasteful happens, people do complain as seen with the most recent Ubisoft release for Assassin's Creed that shipped with technical issues.

And installations are little more than annoyances and necessary ones at that. Unfortunately, optical disc drives don't have the bandwidth to push the amount of data necessary for many projects with 1080p textures, lossless audio, etc. By going with a few minutes of installation (Masked to a certain degree in some instances by allowing you to start playing before the installation has finished) to a hard disc drive with faster speeds, that issue is resolved.

Although I do think this simple solution is leading to developers not bothering to optimize their software where its size is concerned (Which I feel will soon be an annoyance for many over the next couple of years as hard drives fill up), it's a small price to pay to keep retail games on optical discs around. 

And on at least one console from the previous generation, installation is nothing but an advantage with the Xbox 360's optional installation feature that allows you to reduce wear & tear on your disc drive, speed load times, and eliminate the noise of a loud disc drive if you so desire for any Xbox 360 game disc other than XBLA compilation discs.

And if you don't want to bother spending 3 or 4 minutes to install a disc (Or if you lack the space), you simply don't bother. It's something the Wii U should be implementing as well as the Playstation 3 for the many games on the platform that don't have mandatory installations.

As a game buyer and player my values have not changed. I don't support internet reliant consoles or games. I do not purchase DLC as I only value physical media. A fanboy might take a stance on something only to change their tune once their favorite brand changes on that stance as well.

I'm fine with consoles needing internet sometimes and DLC(as long they're not charging for stuff that's already on the disk).